IT was over. A bare twenty yards from the brow of the bill the man had won, and now the mare was standing swaying between the shafts, shaking in every limb, her flanks heaving and the sweat streaming off her sodden coat in little rivulets.
Burke was beside her, patting her down and talking to her in a little intimate fashion much as though he were soothing a frightened child.
“You’re all in, aren’t you, old thing?” he murmured sympathetically. Then he glanced up at Jean, who was still sitting in the cart, feeling rather as though the end of the world had occurred and, in some surprising fashion, left her still cumbering the earth.
“She’s pretty well run herself out,” he remarked. “We shan’t have any more trouble going home”—smiling briefly. “I hope not,” answered Jean a trifle flatly.
“You all right?”
She nodded.
“Yes, thank you. You must be an excellent whip,” she added. “I thought the mare would never stop.”
Probably even Jean hardly realised the fineness of the horsemanship of which she had just been a witness—the judgment and coolness Burke had evinced in letting the mare spend the first freshness of her strength before he essayed to check her mad pace; the dexterity with which he had somehow contrived to keep her straight; and finally, the consummate skill with which, that last half-mile, he had played her mouth, rejecting the dead pull on the reins—the instinctive error of the mediocre driver—which so quickly numbs sensation and neutralises every effort to bring a runaway to a standstill.
“Yes. I rather thought our number was up,” agreed Burke absently. He was passing his hands feelingly over the mare to see if she were all right, and suddenly, with a sharp exclamation, he lifted one of her feet from the ground and examined it.
“Cast a shoe and torn her foot rather badly,” he announced. “I’m afraid we shall have to stop at the next village and get her shod. It’s not a mile further on. You and I can have tea at the inn while she’s at the blacksmith’s.”
With a final caress of the steaming chestnut neck, he came back to the side of the cart, reins in hand.
“Can you drive her with a torn foot?” queried Jean.
“Oh, yes. We’ll have to go carefully down this hill, though. There are such a confounded lot of loose stones about.”
He climbed into the dog-cart and very soon they had reached the village, where the chestnut, tired and subdued, was turned over to the blacksmith’s ministrations while Burke and Jean made their way to the inn.
Tea was brought to them upstairs in a quaint, old-fashioned parlour fragrant of bygone times. Oaken beams, black with age, supported the ceiling, and on the high chimneypiece pewter dishes gleamed like silver, while at either end an amazingly hideous spotted dog, in genuine old Staffordshire, surveyed the scene with a satisfied smirk. Through the leaded diamond panes of the window was visible a glimpse of the Moor.
“What an enchanting place!” commented Jean, as, tea over, she made a tour of inspection, pausing at last in front of the window.
Burke had been watching her as she wandered about the room, his expression moody and dissatisfied.
“It’s a famous resort for honeymooners,” he answered. “Do you think”—enquiringly—“it would be a good place in which to spend a honeymoon?”
“That depends,” replied Jean cautiously. “If the people were fond of the country, and the Moor, and so on—yes. But they might prefer something less remote from the world.”
“Would you?”
“I?”—with detachment. “I’m not contemplating a honeymoon.”
Suddenly Burke crossed the room to her side.
“We might as well settle that point now,” he said quietly. “Jean, when will you marry me?”
She looked at him indignantly.
“I’ve answered that question before. It isn’t fair of you to reopen the matter here—and now.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t fair. In fact, I’m not sure that it isn’t rather a caddish thing for me to do, seeing that you can’t get away from me just now. But all’s fair in love and war. And it’s both love and war between us two”—grimly.
“The two things don’t sound very compatible,” fenced Jean.
“It’s only war till you give in—till you promise to marry me. Then”—a smouldering light glowed in his eyes—“then I’ll show you what loves means.”
She shook her head.
“I’m afraid,” she said, attempting to speak coolly, “that it means war indefinitely then, Geoffrey. I can give you no different answer.”
“You shall!” he exclaimed violently. “I tell you, Jean, it’s useless your refusing me. I won’t take no. I want you for my wife—and, by God, I’m going to have you!”
She drew away from him a little, backing into the embrasure of the window. The look in his eyes frightened her.
“Whether I will or no?” she asked, still endeavouring to speak lightly. “My feelings in the matter don’t appear to concern you at all.”
“I’d rather you came willingly—but, if you won’t, I swear I’ll marry you, willing or unwilling!”
He was standing close to her now, staring down at her with sombre, passion-lit eyes, and instinctively she made a movement as though to elude him and slip back again into the room. In the same instant his arms went round her and she was prisoned in a grip from which she was powerless to escape.
“Don’t struggle,” he said, as she strove impotently to release herself. “I could hold you from now till doomsday without an effort.”
There was a curious thrill in his voice, the triumphant, arrogant leap of possession. He held her pressed against him, and she could feel his chest heave with his labouring breath.
“You’re mine—mine! My woman—meant for me from the beginning of the world—and do you think I’ll give you up?... Give you up? I tell you, if you were another man’s wife I’d take you away from him! You’re mine—every inch of you, body and soul. And I want you. Oh, my God, how I want you!”
“Let me go... Geoffrey...”
The words struggled from her lips. For answer his arms tightened round her, crushing her savagely, and she felt his kisses burning, scorching her face, his mouth on hers till it seemed as though he were draining her very soul.
When at last he released her, she leant helplessly against the woodwork of the window, panting and shaken. Her face was white as a magnolia petal and her eyes dark-rimmed with purple shadow.
A faint expression of compunction crossed Burke’s face.
“I suppose—I shall never be forgiven now,” he muttered roughly.
With an effort Jean forced her tongue to answer him.
“No,” she said in a voice out of which every particle of feeling seemed to have departed. “You will never be forgiven.”
A look of deviltry came into his eyes. He crossed the room and, locking the door, dropped the key into his pocket.
“I think,” he remarked coolly, “in that case, I’d better keep you a prisoner here till you have promised to marry me. It’s you I want. Your forgiveness can come after. I’ll see to that.”
The result of his action was unexpected. Jean turned to the window, unlatched it, and flung open the casement.
“If you don’t unlock that door at once, Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “I shall leave the room—this way”—with a gesture that sufficiently explained her meaning.
Her voice was very steady. Burke looked at her curiously.
“Do you mean—you’d jump out?” he asked, openly incredulous.
Her eyes answered him. They were feverishly bright, with an almost fanatical light in them, and suddenly Burke realised that she was at the end of her tether, that the emotional stress of the last quarter of an hour had taken its toll of her high-strung temperament and that she might even do what she had threatened. He had no conception of the motive behind the threat—of the imperative determination which had leaped to life within her to endure or suffer anything rather than stay locked in this room with Burke, rather than give Blaise, the man who held her heart between his two hands, ground for misunderstanding or mistrusting her anew.
Burke fitted the key into the lock of the door and turned it sulkily.
“You prim little thing! I was only teasing you,” he said. “Do you mean you’re really as frightened as all that of—what people may say? I thought you were above minding the gossip of ill-natured scandal-mongers.”
Jean grasped eagerly at the excuse. It would serve to hide the real motive of her impulsive action.
“No woman can afford to ignore scandal,” she answered quickly. “After all, a woman’s happiness depends mostly on her reputation.”
Burke’s eyes narrowed suddenly. He looked at her speculatively, as though her words had suggested a new train of thought, but he made no comment. Somewhat abstractedly he opened the door and allowed her to pass out and down the stairs. Outside the door of the inn they found the mare and dog-cart in charge of an ostler.
“The mare’s foot’s rather badly torn, sir,” volunteered the man, “but the blacksmith thinks she’ll travel all right. Far to go, sir?”
“Nine or ten miles,” responded Burke laconically.
He was curiously silent on the way home. It was as though the chain of reasoning started by Jean’s comment on the relation scandal bears to a woman’s happiness still absorbed him. His brows were knit together morosely.
Jean supposed he was probably reproaching himself for his conduct that afternoon. After all, she reflected, he was normally a man of decent instincts, and though the flood-tide of his passion had swept him into taking advantage of the circumstances which had flung them together in the solitude of the little inn, he would be the first to agree, when in a less lawless frame of mind, that his conduct had been unpardonable. Although, even from that, one could not promise that he would not be equally culpable another time!
Blaise had proved painfully correct in his estimate of the dangers attaching to unexploded bombs. Jean admitted it to herself ruefully. And she was honest enough also to admit that, with his warning ringing in her ears and with the memory of what had happened in the rose garden to illumine it, she herself was not altogether clear of blame for the incidents of the afternoon.
She had played with Burke, even encouraged him to a certain extent, allowing him to be in her company far more frequently than was altogether wise, considering the circumstance of his hot-headed love for her.
It was with somewhat of a mental start of surprise that she found herself seeking for excuses for his behaviour—actually trying to supply adequate reasons why she should overlook it!
His brooding, sulky silence as he drove along, mile after mile, was not without its appeal to the inherent femininity of her. He did not try to excuse or palliate his conduct, made no attempt to sue for forgiveness. He loved her and he had let her see it; manlike, he had taken what the opportunity offered. And she didn’t suppose he regretted it.
The faintest smile twitched the comers of her lips. Burke was not the type of man to regret an unlawful kiss or two!
She was conscious that—as usual, where he was concerned—her virtuous indignation was oozing away in the most discreditable and hopeless fashion. There was an audacious charm about the man, an attractiveness that would not be denied in the hot-headed way he went, all out, for what he wanted.
Other women, besides Jean had found it equally difficult to resist. His sheer virility, with its splendid disregard for other people’s claims and its conscienceless belief that the battle should assuredly be to the strong, earned him forgiveness where, for misdeeds not half so flagrant, a less imperious sinner would have been promptly shown the door.
But no woman—not even the women to whom he had made love without the excuse of loving—had ever shown Burke the door or given him the kind of treatment which he had thoroughly well merited twenty times over. And Jean was no exception to the rule.
At least he had some genuine claim on her forgiveness—the claim of a love which had swept through his very bung like a flame, the fierce passion of a man to whom love means adoration, worship—above all, possession.
And what woman can ever long remain righteously angry with a man who loves her—and whose very offence is the outcome of the overmastering quality of that love? Very few, and certainly none who was so very much a woman, so essentially feminine as Jean.
It was in a very small voice, which she endeavoured to make airily detached, that she at last broke the silence which had reigned for the last six miles or so.
“I suppose I shall have to forgive you—more or less. One can’t exactly quarrel with one’s next door neighbour.” Burke smiled grimly.
“Can’t one?”
“Well, there’s Judith to be considered.”
“A rather curious expression came into her eyes.
“Yes,” he agreed. “There’s Judith to be considered.” There was a hint of irony in the dry tones.
“It would complicate matters if I were not on speaking terms with her brother,” pursued Jean.
She waited for his answer, but none came. The threatened possibility contained in her speech appeared to have fallen on deaf ears, and the silence seemed likely to continue indefinitely.
Jean prompted him gently.
“You might, at least, say you are sorry for—for——”
“For kissing you?”—swiftly.
“Yes”—flushing a little.
“But I’m not. Kissing you”—with deliberation—“is One of the things I shall never regret. When I come to make my peace with Heaven and repent in sackcloth and ashes for my sins of omission and commission, I shan’t include this afternoon in the list, I assure you. It was worth it—if I pay for it afterwards in hell.”
He was silent for a moment. Then:
“But I’ll promise you one thing. I’ll never kiss you again till you give me your lips yourself.”
Jean smiled at the characteristic speech. She supposed this was as near an apology as Burke would ever get.
“That’s all right, then,” she replied composedly. “Because I shall never do that.”
He flicked the chestnut lightly with the whip.
“I think you will,” he said. “I think”—he looked at her somewhat enigmatically—“that you will give me everything I want—some day.”
THROUGHOUT the day following that of the expedition to Dartmoor, Nick seemed determined to keep out of Jean’s way. It was as though he feared she might force some confidence from him that he was loth to give, and, in consequence, deliberately avoided being alone with her.
On the second day, however, as luck would have it, she encountered him in the corridor just outside her own sitting-room. He was striding blindly along, obviously not heeding where he was going, and had almost collided with her before he realised that she was there.
He jerked himself backwards.
“I beg your pardon,” he muttered, still without looking at her, and made as though to pass on.
Jean checked him with a hand on his sleeve. She had not watched the dogged sullenness of his face throughout yesterday to no purpose, and now, as her swift gaze searched it anew, she felt convinced that something fresh had occurred to stir him. It was impossible for Jean to see a friend in trouble without wanting to “stand by.”
“Nick, old thing, what’s wrong?” she asked.
He stared at her unseeingly. “Wrong?” he muttered. “Wrong?”
“Yes. Come in here and let’s talk it out—whatever it is.” With gentle insistence she drew him into her sitting-room. “How,” she said, when she had established him in an easy-chair by the open window and herself in another, “what’s gone wrong? Are you still boiling over about that trick Sir Adrian played on Claire the day of the picnic?”
She spoke lightly—more lightly than the occasion warranted—of set purpose, hoping to reduce the tension under which Nick was obviously labouring. His face hurt her. The familiar lazy insouciance which was half its charm was blotted out of it by some heavy cloud of tragic significance. He looked as though he had not slept for days, and his eyes, the gaiety burnt out of them by pain, seemed sunken in his head.
He stared at her blankly for a moment. Then he seemed to awaken to the meaning of her question.
“No,” he said slowly. “No. The boiling over part is done with—finished.... I’m going to take her away from him.”
He spoke with a curious precision. It frightened Jean far more than any impetuous outburst of anger could have done. She made no answer for a moment, but her mind worked rapidly. She did not doubt the absolute sincerity of his intention. This was no mere reckless boast of an angry lover, but the sane, considered aim and object of a man who has come, by way of some long agony of thwarting, to a set determination.
“Do you mean that, Nick?” she asked at last, to gain time.
“Do I mean it?” he laughed. Then his hands gripped the arms of the chair and he leaned forward. “I saw her—last evening after dinner.... Her shoulder was black.”
A sharp cry broke from Jean’s lips.
“Not—not—he hadn’t——”
Nick nodded.
“He had struck her. There was one of the usual scenes when they got back from the Moor—and he struck her.... It’s the first time he has ever actually laid hands on her. It’s going to be the last”—grimly.
Jean was silent. Her whole soul was in revolt against the half-mad, drug-ridden creature who was making of Claire’s life a devil martyrdom; the instinct to protect her, to succour her in some way, asserting itself with almost passionate force. And yet—— She knew that Nick’s way was not the right way.
“Yes, it must be the last time,” she agreed. “But—but, Nick, your plan won’t do, you know.”
Nick stiffened.
“Think not?” he said curtly. “Can you suggest a better?” Then, as Jean remained miserably silent: “Nor can I. And one thing I swear—I won’t leave the woman I love in the hands of a man who is practically a maniac, to be tortured day after day, mentally and physically, just whenever he feels like it.”
It struck Jean as curious that Nick had been able, more or less, to keep himself in hand whilst Sir Adrian inflicted upon Claire whatever of mental and spiritual torture seemed good in his distorted vision. It was the fact that he had hurt her physically, laid his hand upon her in actual violence, which had scattered Nick’s self-control to the four winds of heaven. To Jean herself, it seemed conceivable that the mental anguish of Claire’s married life had probably far outstripped any mere bodily pain. Half tentatively she gave expression to her thoughts.
Nick sprang to his feet.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “If you were a man, you’d understand! I see red when I think of that damned brute striking the woman I love. It—it was sacrilege!”
“And won’t it be—another kind of sacrilege—if you take her away with you, Nick?” asked Jean very quietly.
He flushed dully.
“He’ll divorce her, and then we shall marry,” he answered.
“Even so”—steadily—“it would be doing evil that good may come.”
“Then we’ll do it”—savagely. “It’s easy enough for you to sit there moralising, perfectly placid and comfortable. Claire and I have borne all we can. It has been bad enough to care as we care for each other, and to live apart But when it means that Claire is to suffer unspeakable misery and humiliation while I stand by and look on—why, it’s beyond human endurance. You’re not tempted. You’ve no conception what you’re talking about.”
Jean sat very still and silent while Nick stormed out the bitterness of soul, recognising the truth of every word he littered—even of the gibes which, in the heedlessness of his own pain, he flung at herself.
Presently she got up and moved rather slowly across to his side.
“Nick,” she said, and her eyes, looking into his, were very bright and clear and steady. Somehow for Nick they held the semblance of two flames, torches of pure light, burning unflickeringly in the darkness. “Nick, every word you say is true. I’m not tempted as you and Claire have been, and so it seems sheer cheek my interfering. But I’m only asking you to do what I pray I’d be strong enough to do myself in like circumstances. I don’t believe any true happiness can ever come of running away from duty. And if ever I’m up against such a thing—a choice like this—I hope to God I’d be able to hang on... to run straight, even if it half killed me to do it.”
The quick, impassioned utterance ceased, and half shrinkingly Jean realised that she had spoken out of the very depths of her soul, crystallising in so many words the uttermost ideal and credo of her being. In some strange, indefinable fashion it was borne in on her that she had reached an epoch of her life. It was as when a musician, arrived at the end of a musical period, strikes a chord which holds the keynote of the ensuing passage.
She faltered and looked at Nick beseechingly, suddenly self-conscious, as we most of us are when we find we have laid bare a bit of our inmost soul to the possibly mocking eyes of a fellow human being.
But Nick’s eyes were not in the least mocking.
Instead of that, some of the hardness seemed to have gone out of them, and his voice was very gentle, as, taking Jean’s two hands in his, he answered:
“I believe you would run straight, little Jean—even if it meant tearing your heart out of your body to do it. But, you know, you’re always on the side of the angels—instinctively. I’m only a man—just an average earthy man”—smiling ruefully—“and my ideals all tumble down and sit on the ground in a heap when I think of what my girl’s enduring as Latimer’s wife. I believe I might stick my part of the business—but I can’t stick it for her.”
“And yet,” urged Jean, “if you go away together, Nick, it’s she who’ll pay, you know. The woman always does. Supposing—supposing Sir Adrian doesn’t divorce her—refuses to? It would be just like him to punish her that way. What about Claire—then?”
“He would divorce her,” protested Nick harshly.
Jean shook her head.
“I don’t think so. Honestly, I believe he would get undiluted satisfaction out of the fact that, as long as he lived, he could stand between Claire and everything that a normal woman wants—home, and a sheltered life, and the knowledge that no one can ‘say things’ about her. Oh, Nick, Nick! Between you—you and Sir Adrian—you’d make an outcast of Claire, make her life a worse hell with you than it is without you.” She paused, then went on more quietly: “Have you said anything to her about this—told her what you want her to do?”
“No, not yet—not definitely.”
Jean breathed a quick sigh of relief.
“Then don’t! Promise me you won’t, Nick?”
“She might refuse, after all,” he suggested, evading a direct answer.
“Refuse! You know her better than that. If you wanted Claire to make a burnt-offering of herself for your benefit to-morrow, you know she’d do it! And—and”—laughing a little hysterically—“pretend, too, that she enjoyed the process of being grilled! No, Nick, it’s up to you to—to just go on helping to make her life bearable, as you have done for the last two years.”
“It’s asking too much of me, Jean.”
Nick spoke a little thickly. He was up against one of man’s most primitive instincts—the instinct to protect and comfort and cherish the woman he loved.
“I know. It’s asking everything of you.”
Jean waited. She felt that she had gained a certain amount of ground—that Nick’s resolution had weakened a little in response to her pleading, but she feared to drive him too far. She fancied she could hear steps crossing the hall below. If someone should come upstairs and disturb them now, while things were still trembling in the balance——
“See, Nick,” she began to speak again hurriedly. “You believe I’m your pal—yours and Claire’s?”
“I know it,” he replied quietly.
“And—and you do care a bit about me?”—smiling a little.
“You’re the third woman in my world, Jean. After Claire and my mother.”
“Then, to please me—for nothing else in the world, if you like, but because I ask it—will you let things stay as they are for a few weeks longer? Just that little while, Nick? We’re going to London next week. That’ll make a break—bring us all back to a calmer, more everyday outlook on things. Will you wait? Sir Adrian may never strike Claire again. And it wouldn’t be fair—just now, at a time when she is feeling horribly bitter and humiliated from that—that insult—to ask her to go away with you. Give her a fair chance to decide a big question like that when things are at their normal level—not when they are worse than usual. To ask her now would be to take advantage of the feeling she must have, just at this moment, that her life is unbearable. It wouldn’t be playing the game.”
He made no answer, and Jean waited with increasing trepidation. She was sure now that she could hear footsteps. Someone had mounted the stairs and was coming along the corridor towards her room.
“Nick!” The low, agitated whisper burst from her as the steps halted outside the door. “Promise me!”
It seemed an eternity before he answered.
“Very well. I promise. You’ve won for the moment—‘Saint Jean’!”
He smiled at her, rather sadly. Before she could reply, Blaise’s voice sounded outside the door, asking if he might come in, and with a feeling of intense relief that the battle was won for the moment, Jean gave the required permission. As his brother entered the room, Nick quitted it, brushing past him abruptly.
Tormarin’s eyes questioned Jean’s;
“We have been discussing Sir Adrian,” she explained, as the door closed behind Nick. “And—and Claire.”
He nodded comprehendingly.
“Poor old Nick!” he said. “It’s damned rough on him. Latimer ought to be carefully and quickly chloroformed out of the way. He’s as much a menace to society as a mad dog.”
Jean sighed.
“I’m afraid they’re very unhappy—Nick and Claire.”
“I wonder Claire doesn’t chuck her husband,” said Blaise. “And take whatever of happiness she can get out of the world.”
Jean shook her head.
“You know you don’t mean that. You don’t really believe in snatching happiness—at all costs.”
“I’d let precious little stand in the way. If I were Nick I think I should do it.”
“But being you?”
Jean did not know what unaccountable impulse induced her to give a personal and individual twist to what had been developing almost into an academic discussion. Perhaps it was the familiar, unsatisfied longing to hear Blaise himself define the thing which kept them apart—even though, since Lady Anne’s disclosure, she could guess only too well what it was. Or perhaps it was the faint, tormenting hope that one day his determination would weaken and his love sweep away all barriers.
He looked at her contemplatively.
“Sometimes the past makes claims upon a man which forbid him to snatch at happiness. I don’t believe in any man’s shirking his just punishment for the evil he has done. What he has brought on himself, that he must bear. But Nick and Claire have had no part in bringing about their own tragedy. They are just the sport of chance—of an ill fate. They are morally free to take their happiness in a way in which I shall never be free to take mine, as long as I live.” He regarded her steadily. “There are certain things for which I have proved myself unfitted—with which it is evident I am not to be trusted. And one of those is the safeguarding of any woman’s happiness.”
Jean felt her throat contract. It would always be the same, then! The long tentacles of the past would reach out eternally into the future. The woman who had been his wife—the woman who had destroyed herself, and, in so doing, hanged a millstone of remorse about his neck—would stand forever at the gateway of the garden of happiness, her dead lips silently denying him—and, with him, the woman who loved him—the right to enter.
With an effort Jean answered that part of his speech which had reference only to Claire and Nick.
“There are other ways, though, in which they have no moral right. I grant that Claire was persuaded, almost driven into marrying Sir Adrian by her parents, but, after all, we each have our individual free will. She could have refused to obey them. Or, if she felt there were reasons why she must marry him—the material advantage to her parents, and so on, why, she ought to have reckoned the cost I don’t mean to be hard, Blaise————-” She broke off wistfully.
“You—hard!” He laughed a little, as though amused.
“Only—only one must try to be fair all round—to look at things straight.”
She leaned her chin on her palm and her eyes grew thoughtful.
“I don’t know, but it seems to me that we weren’t meant to run away from things—hard things. If a man and a woman marry, they must accept their responsibilities—not evade them.”
So absorbed was she in her trend of thought that she never realised how directly this speech must strike at Blaise himself. His face changed slightly.
“You’re right, of course,” he said abruptly. “You—generally are. And if all women were like you, it would be easy enough.”
His eyes dwelt with a curious intentness on the pure outline of her face; on the parted, tenderly curved lips, and the golden eyes with their momentary touch of the idealist and the dreamer.
It seemed as if the quiet intensity of his regard drew her, for slowly she turned her head and met his gaze, flushing suddenly and faltering under it. The consciousness of him, of his nearness, swept her from head to foot, and it seemed to her as though now, in this moment, they were in closer touch, nearer understanding, than they had ever been.
The dreamer and idealist vanished and it was all at once just sheer woman, passionate and wistful and tremulous, and infinitely alluring, that looked at him out of the golden eyes.
With a stifled exclamation he caught her hands in his.
“Beloved——”
And the whole of a man’s forbidden, thwarted love vibrated in the word as he spoke it.
Then he bent his head, and for a moment his lips were against her soft palms....
She stood very still and quiet when he had gone, realising in every quivering nerve of her that whatsoever the future might bring—even though Blaise might choose to shut himself away from her again as in the past and the dividing wall between them rise as high as heaven—she knew now, without any shadow of doubt or questioning, that he loved her.
In the burning utterance of a single word, in the pressure of passionate, renouncing lips, the assurance had been given, and nothing could ever take it away again.
She spread out her hands, palms upward, and looked at them curiously.
“H AVE you been very bored, Nick?”
The week in London had nearly run its course, and Lady Anne’s eyes begged charmingly for a negative. Nick accorded it with a smile.
“I’m never bored with you, madonna; you know that,” he said. “And hotel life is always more or less amusing. One comes across such queer types. There’s one here this evening has been intriguing me enormously. At a little table by herself—do you see her? A tall, rather gorgeous-looking being—kind of cross between the Queen of Sheba and Lucretia Borgia.”
Lady Anne threw a veiled glance in the direction indicated.
“Yes, she’s a very handsome woman, obviously not English.” Her eyes travelled onwards towards the door. “I wish Blaise and Jean would hurry up,” she added impatiently. “They’re taking an unconscionable time to dress.”
The two latter had come in late from a sight-seeing expedition undertaken on Jean’s behalf, and had only returned to the hotel just as Lady Anne and Nick were preparing to make their way in to dinner.
“For such a deliberate matchmaker, you’re a lot too impatient, madonna,” commented Nick teasingly. “That they should have stayed out together until the very last moment ought to have pleased you immensely.”
Lady Anne made a small grimace.
“So it does—theoretically. Only from a practical and purely material point of view, everything else sinks into insignificance beside the fact that I am literally starving. Oh!”—joyfully catching sight of Jean and Tormarin making their way up the room—“Here they are at last! Collect our waiter, Nick, and let’s begin.”
Neither of the late-comers appeared in the least embarrassed by the tardiness of their arrival, said they responded to tentative enquiries concerning their afternoon’s amusement with a disappointing lack of self-consciousness.
Lady Anne experienced an inward qualm of misgiving. There seemed too calm and tranquil a camaraderie between the two to please her altogether. It was as though the last few days had brought about a silent understanding between them—a wordless compact.
She picked up the menu and assumed an absorption in its contents which she was far from feeling.
“What are we all going to eat?” she asked. “I think we must hurry a little, or we shall be late for the play. Then I shall lose the exquisite thrill of seeing the curtain go up.” Tormarin looked entertained.
“Does it still thrill you, you absurdly youthful person?”
“Of course it does. I always consider that the quality of the thrill produced by the rise of the curtain is the measure of one’s capacity for enjoyment. When it no longer thrills me, I shall know that I am getting old and bored, and that I only go to the theatre to kill time and because everyone else goes.”
Dinner proceeded leisurely in spite of Lady Anne’s admonition that they should hurry, and presently Nick, who had glanced across the room once or twice as though secretly amused, remarked confidentially:
“My Lucretia Borgia lady is taking a quite uncommon interest in someone of our party. I’m afraid I can’t flatter myself that she’s lost her heart to me, as I’ve only observed this development since Jean and Blaise joined us. Blaise, I believe it’s you who have won her devoted—if, probably, somewhat violent—affections.”
“Your Lucretia Borgia lady? Which is she?” enquired Jean.
“You can’t see her, because you are sitting with your back to her,” replied Nick importantly. “And it isn’t manners to screw your head round in a public restaurant—even although the modern reincarnation of an unpleasantly vengeful lady may be sitting just behind you. But if you’ll look into that glass opposite you—a little to the right side of it—you’ll see who I mean. She’s quite unmistakable.”
Jean tilted her head a little and peered slantwise into the mirror which faced her. It was precisely at the same moment that Nick’s “Lucretia Borgia lady” looked up for the second time from her pêche Melba, and Jean found herself gazing straight into the dense darkness of the eyes of Madame de Varigny.
“Why—why————” she stammered in astonishment. “It is the Comtesse de Varigny!” She turned to Lady Anne, adding explanatorily: “You remember, madonna, I told you about her? She chaperoned me at Montavan, after Glyn had departed.”
The recognition had been mutual. Madame de Varigny had half-risen from her seat and was poised in an attitude of expectancy, smiling and gesturing with expressive hands an invitation to Jean to join her.
“I’ll go across and speak to her,” said Jean. “I can’t imagine what she is doing in London.”
“I suppose you, too, met this rather splendid-looking personage at Montavan?” enquired Nick of his brother, as Jean quitted the table.
Tormarin shook his head.
“I never spoke to her. I saw her once, on the night of a fancy-dress ball at the hotel, arrayed as Cleopatra.”
“She’d look the part all right,” commented Nick. “She gives me the impression of being one of those angel-and-devil-mixed kind of women—the latter flavour preponderating. I should rather feel the desirability of emulating Agag in any dealings I had with her. Good Lord!”—with a lively accession of interest—“Jean’s bringing her over here. By Jove! She really is a beautiful person, isn’t she. Like a sort of Eastern empress.”
“Madame de Varigny wishes to be presented to you, Lady Anne,” said Jean, and proceeded to effect introductions all round.
“I remember seeing you with Mees Peterson at Montavan,” remarked the Countess, as she shook hands with Blaise, her dark eyes resting on him curiously.
“Join us and finish your dinner at our table,” suggested Lady Anne hospitably.
But Madame de Varigny protested volubly that she had already finished her meal, though she would sit and talk with them a little if it was agreeable? It was—quite agreeable. She herself saw to that. No one could be more charming than she when she chose, and on this occasion she elected to make herself about as altogether charming as it is possible for a woman to be, entirely conquering the hearts of Lady Anne and Nick. Her simple, childlike warm-heartedness of manner was in such almost ludicrous contrast to her majestic, dark-browed type of beauty that it took them completely by storm.
“This is only just a flying visit that I pay to England,” she explained artlessly. “It is a great good fortune that I should have chanced to encounter ma chère Mees Peterson.”
“It’s certainly an odd chance brought you to the same hotel,” agreed Nick.
“Is it not?”—delightedly.
And, from the frank wonder and satisfaction she evinced at the coincidence, no one could possibly have surmised that the sole cause and origin of her “flying visit” was a short paragraph contained in the Morning Post, a copy of which, by her express order, had been delivered daily at Chateau Varigny ever since her return thither from the Swiss Alps. The paragraph referred simply to the arrival at Claridge’s of Lady Anne Brennan, accompanied by her two sons and Miss Jean Peterson.
“And are you making a long stay in London?” enquired Madame de Varigny.
Lady Anne shook her head.
“No. We go back to Staple to-morrow.”
The other’s face fell.
“But how unfortunate! I shall then see nothing of my dear Mees Peterson.”
She seemed so distressed that Lady Anne’s kind heart melted within her, albeit it accorded ill with her plans to increase the number of her party.
“We are going on to the theatre,” she said impulsively. “If you have no other engagement, why not come with us? There will be plenty of room in our box.”
Madame de Varigny professed herself enchanted. Curiously enough, she seemed to have no particular wish to draw Jean into anything in the nature of a private talk, but appeared quite content just to take part in the general conversation, while her eyes rested speculatively now upon Jean, now upon Tormarin, as though they afforded her an abstract interest of some kind.
Even at the theatre, where from her corner seat she was able to envisage the other occupants of the box, she seemed almost as much interested in them as in the play that was being performed on the stage. Once, as Tormarin leaned forward and made some comment to Jean, their two pairs of eyes meeting in a look of mutual understanding of some small joke or other, the quiet watcher smiled contentedly, as though the little byplay satisfied some inner questioning.
With the fall of the curtain at the end of the first act, she turned to Lady Anne, politely enthusiastic.
“But it is a charming play,” she said. “It is no wonder the house is so full.”
Her glance strayed carelessly over the body of the auditorium, then was suddenly caught and held. A minute later she touched Jean’s arm.
“I think there is someone in the stalls trying to attract your attention,” she observed quietly.
Even as she spoke, Nick, too, became aware of the same fact.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed. “There’s Geoffrey Burke down below. I didn’t know he was in town.”
Madame de Varigny found the effect upon her companions of this apparently innocent announcement distinctly interesting. It was as though a thrill of disconcerting consciousness ran through the other occupants of the box. Jean flushed suddenly and uncomfortably, and the dark, keen eyes that were watching from behind the fringe of dusky lashes noted an almost imperceptible change of expression flit across the faces of both Lady Anne and Tormarin. In neither case was the change altogether indicative of pleasure. Then, following quickly upon a bow of mutual recognition, the music of the orchestra suddenly ceased and the curtain went up for the second act.
Once more the curtain had fallen, and, to the hum of conversation suddenly released, the lights flashed up into being again over the auditorium. Simultaneously the door of Lady Anne’s box was opened from the corridor outside.
“May I come in?” said a voice—a pleasant voice with a gay inflection of laughter running through it as though its owner were quite sure of his welcome—and Burke, big and striking-looking in his immaculate evening kit, his ruddy hair flaming wickedly under the electric lights, strolled into the box.
He shook hands all round, his glance slightly quizzical as it met Jean’s, and then Lady Anne presented him to the Comtesse de Varigny.
It almost seemed as though something, some mutual recognition of a kindred spirit, flashed from the warm southern-dark eyes to the fiery red-brown ones, and when, a minute or two later, Burke established himself in the seat next Jean, vacated by Nick, he murmured in a low tone:
“Where did you find that Eastern-looking charmer? I feel convinced I could lose my heart to her without any effort.”
Jean could hardly refrain from smiling. This was her first meeting with Burke since the occasion of the scene which had occurred between them in the little parlour at the “honeymooners’ inn,” and now he met her with as much composure and arrogant assurance as though nothing in the world, other than of a mutually pleasing and amicable nature, had taken place. It was so exactly like Burke, she reflected helplessly.
“Then you had better go and make love to her,” she suggested. “There happens to be a husband in the background—a little hypochondriac with quite charming manners—but I don’t suppose you would consider that any obstacle.”
“None,” retorted Burke placidly. “I’m quite certain she can’t be in love with him. Her taste would be more—robust, I should say. Where is she stopping?”
“At Claridge’s. We met her there this evening. I knew her in Switzerland.”
“Well, you shall all come out to supper with me to-morrow:—-the Countess included.”
Jean shook her head demurely.
“We shall all be back at Staple to-morrow—the Countess excepted. You can take her.”
“Then the supper must be to-night,” replied Burke serenely.
“What are you doing in town, anyway?” asked Jean. “Is Judith with you?”
“No. Came up to see my tailor”—laconically.
He crossed the box to arrange matters with Lady Anne, and before the curtain rose on the last act it was settled that they should all have supper together after the play.
Later, when Burke had once more resumed his seat next to Jean, Madame de Varigny, whose hearing, like her other senses, was preternaturally acute, caught a whispered plaint breathed into Nick’s ear by Lady Anne.
“Now isn’t that provoking, Nick, darling? Why on earth need Geoffrey Burke have turned up in town on our last evening? I was hoping, later on—if you and I were very discreet and effaced ourselves—that Blaise and Jean might settle things.”
Madame de Varigny’s eyes remained fixed upon the stage. There was no change in their expression to indicate that Lady Anne’s plaintive murmur had at that moment supplied her with the key of the whole situation as it lay between Jean and the two men who were sitting one each side of her.
But the following evening, when, the Staple party having left town, she and Burke were dining alone together at a little restaurant in Soho, the knowledge she had gleaned bore fruit.
Burke never quite knew what impulse it was that had prompted him, as he made his farewells after the supper-party, to murmur in Madame de Varigny’s ear, “Dine with me to-morrow night.” It was as though the dark, mysterious eyes had spoken to him, compelling him to some sort of friendly overture which the shortness of his acquaintance with their owner would not normally have inspired.
It was not until the coffee and cigarette stage of the little dinner had been reached that Madame de Varigny suddenly shot her dart.
“So you come all the way up from this place, Coombe—Coombe Eavie?—to see Mees Peterson, and hey, presto! She vanish the next morning!”
Burke stared at her almost rudely. The woman’s perspicacity annoyed him.
“I came up to see my tailor,” he replied curtly.
“Mais parfaitement!” she laughed—low, melodious laughter, tinged with a frank friendliness of amusement which somehow smoothed away Burke’s annoyance at her shrewd summing up of the situation. “To see your tailor. Naturellement! But you were not sorry to encounter Mees Peterson also, hein? You enjoyed that?”
Burke’s eyes gleamed at her.
“Do you think a dog enjoys looking at the bone that’s out of reach?” he said bluntly.
“And is Mees Peterson, then, out of your reach? Me, I do not think so.”
Burke was moved to sudden candour.
“She might not be, if it were not that there is another man——”
“Ce Monsieur Tor-ma-rin?”
“Yes, confound him!”
“We-ell”—with a long-drawn inflection compact of gentle irony. “You should be able to win against this Monsieur Tor-ma-rin. I think”—regarding him intently—“I think you will win.”
Burke shook his head gloomily.
“He had first innings. He met her abroad somewhere—rescued her in the snow or something. That rescuing stunt always pays with a woman. All I did”—with a short, harsh laugh—“was nearly to break her neck for her out driving one day recently!”
“Is she engaged to Monsieur Tormarin?” asked Madame do Varigny quickly.
“No. Luckily, there’s some old affair in the past holds him back.”
She nodded.
“You shall marry her,” she declared with conviction. “See, Monsieur Bewrke—aïe, aïe, quel nom! I am clairvoyante, prophétesse, and I tell you that you weel marry zis leetle brown Jean.”
Her foreign accent strengthened with her increasing emphasis.
Burke looked dubious.
“I’m afraid your clairvoyance will fail this journey madame. She’ll probably marry Tormarin—unless”—his eyes glinting—“I carry her off by force.”
Madame de Varigny shook her head emphatically.
“But no! I do not see it like that. Eh bien! If she become fiancée—engaged to him—you shall come to me, and I will tell you how to make sure that she shall not marry him.”
“Tell me now!”
“Non, non! Win her your own way. Only, if you do not succeed, if Monsieur Tormarin wins her—why, then, come to visit me at Château Varigny.”
That night a letter written in the Comtesse de Varigny’s flowing foreign handwriting sped on its way to France.
“Matters work towards completion,” it ran. “My visit here has chanced bien à propos. There is another would-be-lover besides Blaise Tormarin. I have urged him on to win her if he can, for if I have not wrongly estimated Monsieur Tormarin—and I do not think I have—he is of the type to become more deeply in love and less able to master his feelings if he realises that he has a rival. At present he refrains from declaring himself. The opposition of a rival will probably drive him into a declaration very speedily. When the dog sees the bone about to be taken from him—he snaps! So I encourage this red-headed lion of a man, Monsieur Burke, to pursue his affaire du cour with vigour. For if Blaise Tormarin becomes actually betrothed to Mademoiselle Peterson, it will make his punishment the more complete. I pray the God of Justice that it may not now be long delayed!”